Cairns
“Poetry outlasts everything. It’s a primeval spirit. It’s probably the first speech. It comes with speech. It’s what children do, when they play with their first words. And it comes from nowhere, and it always goes on. And there’s no way to lose it, but people don’t know how to find it. People think they don’t know how to read it, and that they don’t have any need for it. Maybe they don’t have any need for it. I don’t know. The world has poetry inside it anyway.”
“The Person Who Performs” by Alice Notley, with Janique Vigier
This is from a newsletter called “Cairns” written by Joseph Braun.
Cairns have been used all over the world as landmarks for places to explore and sometimes to simply say “someone passed here before you, you are not lost”. Joseph uses words as cairns to signpost books that may turn up as old friends or new ones waiting to be discovered and also as a depiction of the piles of books avid readers often leave in the spaces they inhabit.
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